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Many online marketers are using Web 2.0 to get traffic to their web site via social marketing. Social marketing is a very effective way of promoting your products on the internet as the search engines sees Web 2.0 sites as being very relevant and informational, in result being much easier and faster to get higher rankings in SERPS (search engine result pages).

“Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.” - Wikipedia.org

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We all know the term “it costs money to make money” all too well, and yes, in most cases this is true. But in the world of affiliate marketing this is not the case. In fact, it will only cost you a bit of effort. Affiliate marketing is probably one of the ways of making money that has the least risk involved.

What is affiliate marketing?
Wikipedia.org describes affiliate marketing as ”a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.”

So in other words, affiliate marketing is a win win situation. The affiliate will be compensated when an action took place after a visitor has been on his site. An action can refer to a sale, a lead or whatever the case might be. The business will win as well as he will only have to pay an affiliate when an action has been made from the affiliate’s site.

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Deciding what you want to start selling on the internet will probably be the most difficult decision that you have to make. Here I will be discussing digital an physical products, as well as the positive and negative points of each one.

Physical Products
Physical products offer many advantages when selling them over the internet. You can give detailed descriptions about the products and upload pictures that your visitors can look at. You will have no extra costs than you will normally have when having a retail store and the potential of more buyers is much bigger as you are catering to a bigger market over the internet.

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If you have a website, or just want to make money on the internet then the most important part is to get visitors to your pages. Without visitors you will not make money or generate any sales. This step is called SEO (search engine optimization).

SEO is the process in optimizing your web pages in certain ways, so that you will get more traffic from targeted keywords and at the same time optimizing it in terms of how search engines reads your pages.

I am not going into to much depth with SEO but basically there are two parts to SEO. The first one is “on page optimization” where you optimize for users via keywords etc. and for search engines. The second part is “off page optimization”. On page optimization counts for 15% and off page counts 75% when it comes to search engines.

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As I have stated earlier in my post “So what is Internet Marketing anyway?”, the Internet is like any other business platform out there in lots of respects. In other respects it is completely different. No assumptions must be made and your market research is what it is all about. Some products which sell brilliantly in a normal brick-and-mortar environment, might not sell at all on the Internet. Others might do better. I say again, no assumptions should be made. InternetMarketingSA will teach you how to do your market research properly.

South Africans in general are very skeptical when it comes to new business concepts. I don’t blame them with all the weird and wonderful schemes and scams they’ve been dealt. The problem is that skepticism is not forgiving. It always seems to see the glass half-empty, regardless of the fact that it is filled to the brim. Take multi-level marketing as an example. Even though I myself am not the type (and yes all you MLM’s out there, some of us aren’t the type, and yes there ARE other great ways of making money:)) I personally feel that MLM is one of the most brilliant concepts ever. However, if you are one of those completely and utterly irritated just by the whole concept of it all, then I have good news for you. Internet Marketing has got nothing to do with Multi Level Marketing. It could have something to do with it and some network marketers do use the Internet as a business vehicle, but that has nothing to do with the overall concept of Internet Marketing.

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The thing about South African entrepreneurs is that I am not quite sure they truly understand the potential of the Internet. I am not being disrespectful. I am saying this because I truly believe that the South African entrepreneurial force has unlimited potential, but lacks knowledge. Unfortunately the lovely continent of Africa is light years behind countries like the United States and Korea as far as E-commerce and just basic Internet Marketing understanding are concerned. Now fair enough, we don’t have those huge underwater Internet cables running to us, yet. Be that as it may, there is no excuse to get a better understanding of what our potential is right now at this moment to compete with International Internet-based businesses. The Internet gives us the power to not be ‘behind’ other first world countries. We simply don’t have excuses anymore.

There are so many many South African web sites which are quite frankly glorified business cards. In essence there is not anything wrong with that. However, if you do not tell me of  your web site I would never have known of it.  So basically you are handing out your ‘business card’ to me and that way I know where to find your contact details and read up a little bit what you are about. Again, in essence nothing wrong with that idea, but what if you could truly monetise this ‘business card’ of yours? Automate it so it can generate orders for you while you sleep. Make it visible to the world out there you don’t have to ‘hand out’ your business card anymore, your target market will search for it themselves. Optimise your site so that once they are there, while they are obtaining your contact details, they could possibly buy something as well.

The point I am trying to get through, and what this blog is about, is that there is so much more potential which you can tap into once you understand what you can do on the Internet from a marketing and sales perspective. This is why we are here. We are here to teach you this, and not only concepts, but how to as well. That’s the most important, isn’t it? We all want to know how to. Chris (my partner), and myself have dedicated a big chunk of our lives to this blog to teach you what we know. Here is where you will learn practical steps on how to monetise your existing web sites. It’s not difficult really. It’s just knowing how.

Currently, while I am writing this post our country is on the verge of a recession. Petrol prices are ever increasing, as is the interest rate. Yet inflation does not seem to care and also keeps on rising. With the new and strict National Credit Act recently implemented everybody feels the pressure. I personally feel the NCA is one of the best things that could happen to this country’s economy. However, because of this industry sales like for example vehicles have plummeted and in the process new and wonderful schemes are thought up by the vehicle companies to keep the cash flow, well, flowing. Because of this we see deals like “45% balloon payments with 72 months to pay” which if you think about it defies the whole purpouse the NCA was thought of in the first place. In effect it all just seems like a swirling vortex of economic death at this point in time.

The cool thing about the Internet is that it is not bound to any country by its geographical borders. Therefore if you could make an income from the Internet you could be in the privileged position to be absolutely oblivious of what is going on around you as far as your immediate economic situation is concerned. Now one could argue that the United States, currently being the biggest online spenders, are also faced with some major economic challenges and therefore annuls my previous point. However, even with the economic stress in the United States Internet sales are still growing!

There are some major benefits to exploring the Internet as a means to making money. You can easily have and maintain multiple sources of income. Because of the automation factor, running two, three or even more businesses online are completely viable. What is great about that fact is that if the model works you can simply duplicate it, and all of it from the comfort of your home. However, the best thing about the Internet for me is that I can target an American market, and if my marketing is better than my American competitors, I will be the one making the sale. The playing field is open to everybody. For me it is irrelevant whether I am sitting in South Africa or not. The Internet has made it possible for me to quite simply target the whole of planet Earth! That is the reality of running a business on the Internet. Total and utter freedom to earn money while I sleep, literally.

Cheers